Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Four Swords Manga

Last but not least I will talk about the Four Swords Manga. Well, it's called "Four Swords" in Germany, but actually it's based on Four Swords Adventures or "Four Swords Plus" in Japan. And it's okay. It does the right thing by focusing on having four Links, that's pretty much the main feature of the story. Like Ocarina of Time, this manga comes in two books.

It starts with Link, who's already a hero, but also a blockhead, who only fights on his own. He doesn't want to work together with his father, who is a knight of Hyrule, or anyone else. Of course this ultimately leads to the problem, where he has to work together with three other versions of himself in order to defeat the bad guys. The moral of the whole story is pretty much just about team work. Link got split up in four personalities, the red Link is the cute optimistic guy, the blue Link is hot-tempered and the purple Link is the thinker. And don't how to describe the green Link, he's pretty much just normal. However, naturally they struggle to work together for a while.

They all get split up and have to find each other again. However, they get split up by some force, which is never really explained. Green Link lands in the Desert, Red Link at Kakariko Village, Blue Link in Frozen Hyrule and Purple Link somewhere else (I won't spoil his part). But they find each other again really fast, they somehow get teleported all over the place, which is really weird. But okay, they get teleported to their next destinations in the games, too.

There was one scene, where two of the Links fight each other in an arena placed on lava. This totally reminded me of the Shadow Battles mode and the whole concept of this fight probably came from there.

Well, and then there's Shadow Link. Unlike in the game, there's only one of him, he's an individual in this story. And in the end he even joins the good side, but his role was never really convincing. I prefer the Dark Link, who doesn't talk and just faces Link in a duel or does nasty stuff.

After reading nine Zelda mangas I got my hopes up, that Tingle won't be in any of them. But my hopes were crushed immediatly at the beginning of the 2nd part of Four Swords, where Tingle finally appears. He's all about Force Gems, but luckily he doesn't have many scenes in the manga.

What I really liked about the manga was that it made me wanna play the game. This was not the case with any of the other mangas, but when reading Four Swords I really wanted to replay some of the levels. And I probably will do that later as part of my 25th Anniversary replay orgy.

Well, this is the end of my Zelda manga review special. I hope that some of my shared thoughts were interesting. However, this will probably not be the last manga from Akira Himekawa, Spirit Tracks would be a possible candidate or Link's Awakening, which was recently re-released on 3DS Virtual Console.